raha@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Bob Hettinga) (12/22/85)
[Hello, what's all this stuff about a line-eater??] all this stuff about a line-eater?? THE GREAT WISCONSIN/MISSOURI WAR I've been watching the discussion on The Pail & Shovel ticket at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Here's my $0.02 worth. In 1979, after Mallon & Co. got elected (along with a horse?) at UWM, a guy named Garth Bare (his real name, honest) effectively cloned the joke (right down to most of the platform planks) at Mizzou in Columbia. I was a committee chairman in the student senate, and a dorm chairman for the opposition's campaign. My candidate was an accounting major with 3 years experience in MSA (the SG at UMC), a four-point student, and an expected shoo-in. ho hum. We got creamed. Bad. The biggest landslide in Missouri's history. Garth was passing out play money on election day to buy votes, campaigned in a clown suit, and rode around in a copy of the birthday cake/deathmobile from Animal House (the one which said 'Eat Me'). Promised to flood the stadium and have mock naval battles. Sound familiar to you folks at UWM? Even had a nude campaign poster.... After he got elected, I met him, and Bare turned out to be this rather soft-spoken chemical engineer with a bizarre sense of humor. Really quite responsible, after a fashion, especially after he was given about $500k of student funds to play with. I think he got a little scared. I know I would. Like all SG Presidents, the Prez. (his preferred title) was bound hand and foot most of the time, not so much by the administration, but by competing subgroups of the student population. In order to do anything off-the-wall, Garth had to take money from things like rape crisis centers, rock concert promotion budgets, capital improvements, and other student-dedicated and controlled activities. He didn't get much of a shot at any real crazy- ness. At UWM, Mallon must have really pissed a few people off, or he must have had a student government budget from previous administrations that was mostly bullshit to start with. I take the charitable approach, and assume the latter. After the first semester of the Birthday Party's administration (in January 1980), diplomatic relations between the Mizzou and Wisconsin deteriorated. Letters between Garth and Mallon et.al. got more insulting. This mirrored the world at large: it looked like Reagan was going to be elected, the Russians invaded Afganistan, the hostages were still in Iran, Carter reinstituted Selective Service Registration, etc. A lot of us thought the bombs were going to drop, and we thought we might have a little fun before the world was reduced to anaerobic soup. I drafted a declaration of war. The MSA Senate passed it. We formed the MSA Council of War (COW for short). We pushed it through all the various channels(!?!) to get it recognized as a student organization. We hit all the bars and raised enough money to launch what we called a "pre-frontal strike against the absurdist agressors to the north". Or something like that. You should have seen the media. They thought we had lost our minds. The contemplation of Mutual Assured Destruction can do that to you, I suppose. Hunter Thompson would have approved, had he known. The net result of our efforts was a phone call to the University of Wiscon -sin's dairy barn requesting one ton of bull(well, cow with some sheep)shit. We told them we were organic farmers, and that raw product would be just fine, thanks. The next afternoon, after an all night drive, a pickup full of 'commandos' from Mizzou picked up the requisite ingredient (in nice heavy-duty plastic bags), hung around Madison until three the next morning, and delivered our first strike to the steps of the Student Union Building. We included copies of the UMC "maneater" (which had the 72pt headline "MSA DECLARES WAR"), and called the radio stations to take credit for the raid. We made all the news wires. Once. We declared ourselves the winners because Wisconsin never retaliated, and we couldn't raise any more money. The joke was a little too serious in light of the deteriorating world situation. I have this vision of myself and all the other COW members standing on a hill, passing around a joint and throwing our books, one at a time, as far as we could make them go. I got out of student government after that. Later we got a paper request from the World Order Models Project (whoever they are) for a discussion of our "protest". I never answered it. After starting up his own company, Garth is now in law school at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. He's an alderman in Raytown, Mo., his hometown. I ended up getting interested in space development, and in finance. I even voted for Reagan last time. People like Proxmire and Mondale were directly responsible for gutting the space program. Another one-issue voter. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I suppose. Things change. Bob Hettinga University of Chicago UUCP: ...!sphinx!raha